Brandon Hall: Understanding the Impact of Employer Brand

Understanding your employer brand Think about the hiring process at your organization. What is your top priority? Unsurprisingly, 62% of companies say strengthening their employer brand is their top priority. According to a new Brandon Hall report, organizations that choose to prioritize their employer brand and focus on managing it are 250% more likely to rate their overall talent acquisition efforts as "highly effective." In other words, focusing on your employer brand can lead to an exceptionally effective hiring process. Don't we all want that? Additionally, organizations that said they prioritize their employer brand are 130% more likely to see an increase in employee engagement. Do you want your employees to be more engaged? We thought so. Not only is managing your employer brand good for your organization in general - it also leads to a highly effective hiring process and engaged employees. We're in! Your employer brand is extremely important - it's your image and reputation combined. If people don't think highly of you in those two areas, what do you have left? With the increase in popularity in review sites such as Glassdoor, managing your reputation as an employer is more critical than ever. Understanding relevant key performance indicators Understanding how gains in employer brand management drive performance in recruiting efforts makes it possible to tie these gains to a greater business impact. This doesn't need to be complicated! Many companies simply need to make a switch to more effective platforms to make this goal a reality. Evaluate your current platform and really dig deep into how your current system is helping you - and ways it's hurting you.

Quantifying, qualifying and correlating outcomes How do you ultimately define success when it comes to your employer brand? Well, this depends on which metrics matter the most to you. Do you care about volume, i.e. seeing an increase in page visits, site traffic or job posting views? What about engagement rates such as improving your rankings on search engine results pages or increased social media engagement? Or is your focus baseline measures such as improved cost-per-hire, time-to-fill or offers accepted? Whichever metrics you care most about, keep these in mind to accurately measure and define the success you see as you work to improve your employer brand. When you're evaluating traffic across various brand collateral (including your company career site, social profiles and all job postings), consider these: how many users are viewing job postings on their mobile devices? How many find your career page in a relevant keyword search on Google? Which pages are they visiting most frequently? To learn more about evaluating traffic, download Understanding the Impact of Employer Brand. Additionally, measuring drop-off rates is a key to understand how your job postings are performing, pay attention to not only traffic, but also drop-off rates. If you see certain job postings are being clicked on but people are almost immediately dropping off, it may be time to beef up your job descriptions. Groupon took this approach, gave their job descriptions a much-needed facelift, and saw an immediate increase in performance. "Drop off rates dropped, more time was spent on each page, and we started seeing the applies come in." Baseline measures To fully understand how a strong employer brand impacts your talent acquisition performance, evaluate correlations between changes in volume, exposure and engagement with changes in baseline measures. These measures include:

• Improved cost-per-hire
• Improved time-to-fill
• Improved offers accepted
• Improved new hire retention
• Increase in employee referrals
• Increase in quality of candidates/hires

Additionally, pay attention to relevant KPIs. For many, KPIs are limited to these baseline measures - and ultimately, these baseline measures are what talent acquisition teams are held accountable for. For Box, KPI is close rate. How many offers are declined versus accepted weighs heavily in their assessment of ROI in employer brand. Key recommendations for gauging impact Gauging impact can be a tricky business, but someone's got to do it. Understand the role of both your image and reputation to fully understand how to manage your employer brand as effectively as possible. Also, it's critical to understand which metrics you care about and how you're measuring employer brand success. Brandon Hall For more information on the importance of managing your employer brand, check out Brandon Hall's whitepaper Understanding the Impact of Employer Brand. Learn how to fully understand your employer brand, key performance indicators to consider and how to quantify and qualify your outcomes by focusing more time on managing your employer brand.